10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 8
2. In An Utter Surrealist Mindf*ck... (Reprise)
...a full Nine Inch Nails performance in the Roadhouse was the most normal thing about it.
The cast list triggered various concerns. Was Lynch's intention to stunt cast musicians in acting roles? To land his famous friends a gig? To expand upon the ethereal ambience of the Roadhouse as it existed in the original series, thus risking the idiosyncratic atmosphere of the series itself, the indelible Peaks feeling that, beyond so many of the actual, much-maligned subplots, carried the show through the wilderness years of cultural irrelevance?
The latter is the route Lynch has chosen.
On paper, very little about the performance of "The" Nine Inch Nails makes sense. They are an arena-sized act slumming it in a Pacific Northwestern vista. It should be incongruous. It isn't. Perhaps that risk is why Lynch located a doppelgänger of Little Jimmy Scott - a pinecone decorating his mic stand, a symbol of the dissonance between classic and modern Twin Peaks - to introduce them as "The" Nine Inch Nails.
"She's Gone Away" fits perfectly into this new world - doomy, menacing, discordant, punctuated by Trent Reznor's deranged cackling. Who is the subject, in this context? An earlier scene indicates that the death of Laura Palmer has far-reaching implications on the universe.